Medical Cards

Following Graham Rawle's recent talk and his introduction to his current work in progress, 'The Card',  I was interested in the notion of playing cards that are not all they seem to be. In his presentation Graham discussed the idea of a 'collected set of cards' ie random cards that were found or made and whilst interesting in their own right would never be of any use for professional poker game!

I have never been particularly inspired by the average 'run-of-the-mill' set of playing cards. The functionality of the cards comes before the visual aesthetic in the basic 'suit' cards, hearts, clubs etc (which is understandable for an open and clear game) however,  these always strike me as rather open and clinical. So I have considered an opposite approach, where the visual aesthetic comes first and a very basic code to for number and suit comes second. So there are no symbols for the suits only simple signifiers, eg 6S (6 Spades), AH(Ace Hearts), 2D(2 Diamonds) etc.  Equally, to keep the 'clinical' input I have used some imagery from an early 50's first aid publication as the theme for the collages (hence, 'Medical cards') using these and other random visual elements to balance the visual aesthetic. There has been no intention of a narrative but some might be perceived due to the inclusion of other basic symbols and type. There is a limited colour pallette, the only deviation for this will be for the 'coloured/royal' cards where supplementary imagery is intended.

The intention is that these cards can still be functional, although 'players' will not be able to easily bypass the initial visual content and aesthetic before acknowledging the code/signifiers etc.  I have grouped together the cards produced so far to show an example.